Steve Kline Trivia

Exactly.  A pitcher with really good K rates may mean that he's a pretty good pitcher (at that time anyway), but just because a K rate is bad, it does not mean the pitcher is bad.

I don't think its that people think strikeouts is a way to judge a pitcher because it's a good way to do so.  It's one of the easiest ways.

To get a really solid idea, one would have to analyze all of the various stats available.  Some stats to take into consideration, for example, would be WHIP, BAA, BB/9, K/9, GB vs FB ratio, etc.  It's hard to quantify all of those values into one measure of how good a pitcher is.

The thing about making weak contact is that almost all major-league pitchers seem to do that bout equally well - with a few exceptions on both ends of the spectrum most guys give up roughly the same number of hits on balls in play - the way you keep BAA down is by avoiding balls being put in play at all: with strikeouts.

A pitcher doesn't have to have high K rates to be an effective major-league pitcher.  The only way that a guy with a really low K rate can consistently live in the majors, though, is if he walks significantly fewer people than he strikes out.  Like Chien-Ming Wang.  Or Carlos Silva, until he started walking guys.  Remember Nate Cornejo?  That is usually how it turns out when you have very low K rates, especially when your K rate is lower than your BB rate.  A little luck, and then BLAM!  You suck.

Except Kirk Rueter.  But remember the rule:  There can be only one (Kirk Rueter).

Really, Rueter had a consistently low BABIP, and it happened every year (his 2002 was the really low outlier).  So he was really tricky with a skill for inducing weak contact.  But that is very rare, and Rueter wasn't really that good (although he was damn lucky in 2002).  He also was magic.  You know, because of the lucky shamrock.